I mentioned this a little while ago at ForTheHorde, Lactic Acid may not yet have recovered, so I am risking the death of a damn good blogger in repeating this, but…

My 1st toon was a Hunter. My 1st pet was the scruffy Alpha Worg. I love that dog, my wife in her one WoW related moment, named it and I still have it.

Anyway, we all know the bane of all parties in an instance is the Hunter’s pet, the problem was, what to do with it.

I could stable it.

I could take a flight path

I could outrun it

I could kill it

But under no circumstances at all was I going to DISMISS it. I loved it, and back then hunter’s pets were hard to train.

One day I discovered Dismiss was a temporary thing… Not a permanent thing…

Talents

I knew of them, even occasionally allocated them, but really had no appreciation of their importance. I will come back to this…

Skills
I was pretty good at learning my new skills from the trainer, but I wasn’t all that good at using them.

They were in my spell book somewhere… Somewhere. But a glowing tab doesn’t tell me which new skills I had. (why don’t the new skills glow individually until acknowledged?)

So often they wouldn’t leave the spellbook (ok, I admit it… I didn’t know you had to drag them from the spellbook for a few levels)

Action bars

Many people playing these days wouldn’t have experienced this, but back in the old days your action bars didn’t automatically upgrade your new rank of skills/spells.

Do I need to say anymore?

Ok, I wiil. So I would have more health etc, but I was still getting slaughtered by mobs, cause rank 1 spells really don’t hurt.

More Action Bars

I had an automatic action bar changing mod for a while (until Blizz killed them). It would change from non-combat to combat bars and back as my status changed. Problem was I would be spamming buttons and wouldn’t notice when combat would end, so then I would start casting all sorts of non-combat spells.

So I changed all my non-combat spells to a spare bar, and filled my non-combat bar with heaps of /cheer /hooray /silly /macros.

People thought it was great the way I always cheered etc at the immediate end of each fight.

In reality I was just using a noob-guard.

Keybindings

On my return to Australia in January after 2 months away from WoW, and the beginning of my WoLK experience, I thought it would be a good chance to fix my UI, so I changed a couple of things…

My spec and thus spells

My UI to a very snazzy one not designed for my monitor resolution, so now the action bar icons are about 4mm squares.

All my keybindings after reading a series of excellent posts by Euripedes.

All in one pre-WoW session, in about 20 minutes.

I then spent the next 3 weeks frost nova’ing when I meant to blink, blink when I meant to frost nova. Blast wave, pyroblast, decurse, invisibility, iceblock, hell everything at the wrong time.

This is really where present and future tense comes in. I still can’t remember my iceblock (ie: last night) or invisibility keybinds, and my UI is soooo small I can’t even click on the bloody skills, cause I can’t find them!

Leading the charge

Tank enters the room 1st… Don’t be silly, I’m already there and engaging the mobs… Mmmm ghost running that is.

Gear

In TBC, with time being a premium, I spent hours, days, weeks developing a gear upgrade path and spreadsheet.

I worked my way through that list one quest, one instance, one spellpower at a time.

One day I accidentally skipped a few items for a major upgrade. That was a turning point. Then I looked at the top 2 or 3 (or 1 if it was a quest reward) items, and just aimed for them.

In a twinkle of my Gnomish eye, I was Kara geared, hell, I was Gruul geared. Lowest DPS to highest.

Lesson learned.

Sure prioritize the items, so if upgrades that aren’t in your top 3 drop you grab them, but a linear upgrade path is not the quickest and most efficient path. (Says me sporting more T7.5 gear than most of my mates. Me playing 80 for 4 weeks, them for 4 months – but then I got lucky… Thank you guild!)

Frost

I never used Frost, apart from the odd frost nova. In fact when doing that Sunwell daily that requires you to kill green fire elementals (Green! They can’t be fire!), I had to do two complete 100%, little red man, repairs because I refused to use Frost (and didn’t care that they were immune to fire).

When I finally gave up my “Green can’t equal fire delusions”, I used frost bolt, level 1 frostbolt at level 70! That was all that as on my action bars!

After completing the quest once, over a period of a week, I never picked up that daily again. I am a Fire Mage!

I never used Ice Lance in PvP, in fact only recently used it at all (no, it wasn’t even on my cast bar). That’s when I discovered it proc’d impact!

Mage talents

Back in TBC, I spec’d my Mage for fun. A bit of this, a bit of that, a bit of everything, yet nothing.

At some point, while not having fun in the groundhog day that Shadow Lab became, I realized my fun spec was no fun at all.

I did something anti-noob. I sought out help, I humbled myself on the unofficial WoW forums, got a truckload of help and started having fun.

Yes I was cookie cutter, but downing bosses is much more fun than wiping. Great DPS is much more fun than the rare impact or blast wave.

That is why I leveled from 70-80 in a “fun” spec, then bought the cookie and cut it when I hit 80.

Is that noobtastic Noobaggedon of Nooberegan enough for you?

The good news is, noob isn’t forever, assuming you want to change. Noob can just be a temporary state of delusion that you know it all, that playing the game your way is the best way.

Do you have to EJ it? He’ll no, but it doesn’t hurt to listen to wisdom occasionally, and maybe incorporate a bit into your playstyle.

Remember, Arcane never was, and never will be a viable raid spec! You heard it first at EJ’s, over and over and over again. Just proves everyone can be a noob sometimes.

Noober and Out!

Note: disclaimer or whatever you want to call it. EJ was right, for the longest time. But good on those Noobs that kept insisting that the numbers be reworked, especially after the changes that made it viable.

Still a NOOB

Whoops, noob moment, need to pass the noob baton. I pass it to self confessed ex-forum troll and master of the Critical QQ… Actually I fireball spam it to all my Mage Blogging brethern… I have them all so high up on pedestals that I think I need to bring them down to Gnome level.
This work is licensed under aCreative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

I finally came around to get a dual spec… My second one is fire… Now the question is whether to use it or if I’ll stick to my noobish Arcane?

Btw you’re just asking your brothers, so I guess I’ll go free from this tag? Phuuu! In all honest, I’ve shared quite a few of my noobish memories over the time I’ve been blogging I think. Don’t think I’ve got so much more to come up with without repeating myself too much. But I’ll give it a thought at least. Even though I’m not one of the brethern..

Psht. Arcane is so viable. Just… not as viable as it was before 3.1 :(

Great post! reminded me of a noobish mistake I forget to stick on my post… somehow, the fact that Frost Armor and Ice Armor are different spells escaped me until something like… level 79. I was wondering why my armor only gave 200 bonus armor when I’d just learned a new version. then I checked my spellbook. whoops!

Oh dear, my favorite noob-ly memory is the fact that when I leveled my first mage I didn’t know I could train more than one skill per visit to the trainer! So I carefully chose one thing from the list of green trainables every time I went… When I was level 16 I was still learning skills I should have had at 4 or 6! :D

My first character was a rogue, but the mistake I made is general. I only trained talents in the first tree and didn’t notice the rest until a complete stranger asked me why I didn’t use dual wield. I was ashamed, but most of all I was happy and exited when I went to the trainer and saw all those new abilities waiting for me.

(Thank you, Mr Nice Guy wherever you are. I’m sorry I lied to you when I was explaining the reason behind my unusual choice of weapon. Frankly, I was trying to hide the fact that I had no idea what you were talking about.)

@Game Dame: Funny how more memories this brought back after the post was written… but how much of a noob do i want to appear?

@Zupa, Arioch, Luthvian: There was a time… long long ago, where you didn’t raid as anything but cookie cutter fire spec… but things did change, and one day I will admit is it better than fire… just not today ;-)

@Klepsacovic: Ohh yeah.. I think I was 67 before I respeced for the 1st time… because it cost so much gold… ohhh 5g, that isn’t too bad…

@Arioch: A great post! See we were all Noobs once (or twice or…)

@Larísa: Back to the fire… love it… why be a Noob when you can burn all objectors?
lol Brethren = Males only hunh… so what are females… Sistern (Cistern?)… No you have been generous enough over time sharing your misconceptions… I dare say you will be haunted by that little red man for a long time to come…

@Luthvian: Ohh yeah Frost/Ice Armour…..

@Rhii: Ohh Ohhhh… that’s a killer, but easy to understand. Actually it wouldn’t amaze me if people only ever spec into Frost (from memory the default talent tree displayed)… Still it used to be particularly painful tracking down the “available” skills, glad they put in the filter so I don’t have to use a mod to do the same thing.

@Uncle Nooblus: Isn’t it great having friends like Nim… I bet he doesn’t just remind you once either… it would be constantly… he probably twitters you throughout the day just to remind you…

@Kel: Ahhh, so I wasn’t too far off the mark with the single tree deception… it’s great when there are nice (gentle) guys out there to set you back on the correct path…

@jong: Yep, temporary… but I wasn’t going to take the chance (or do something real stupid like read the tooltip now was I).

@Euripedes, Kel & Arioch:
Re: Noob-guard.

I finally remembered the minor details…
Actually it was on my Gnome Mage that I did the Gnome guard… but watching a Tauren Hunter pump the air would have been cooler..

The bars actually changed based on target type, so enemy targets gave me combat bars, friendly targets gave me “friendly bars”, and no targets gave me “noob-guards”… well eventually.

Initially, every time a mob died (and of course with 3.5 second casts, I would be mid cast), my bars would swap.
If I wasn’t paying close attention, the next think you know I had ported back to Ironforge.

So I fixed the problem, but this meant that after nearly every kill, I would be jumping for joy, and expressing it loudly. Now when you are fighting 6 mobs per pull, 6 cheers can either be quite funny (or after the 2nd or 3rd pull) quite annoying…

Still, I think I got more laughs that insults…

An one more FTW!.
The very first time I created a character, I was left standing there wondering what to do… for like 2-3 minutes.
I had managed to turn my character around so I didn’t see the guy with the big ! sitting over his head (and let’s face it, I wasn’t going to read the hint text now was I!).
Finally someone nearby said, just go see the guy with the quest…

Pff, Arcane was SO last patch. It’s good to be deep Fire again – feels like coming home (plus, my blog name makes sense again!).

note on what you mentioned about the keybinds – I did a complete rework of my keybinds at about, oh, level 65 or thereabouts (it’s been a while) – and my leveling came to a screeching halt – so I can sympathize a bit there. Now, I tend to make small, gradual changes – and put similar spells in the same keybind on different characters. (For example, Frostfire Bolt on the mage = Wrath on the druid.)

I think my biggest noob moment (or noob months, even) was when I decided to go 10/48/3 right from the start as I leveled…I probably could have gone so much faster with a leveling spec. And then, of course, I decided NOT to take Improved Scorch. Silly Vel.

But I digress. This was a wonderful post, loved reading it. Brought back some great memories of the old noobly days. =)